Further evaluations of industry-inspired pair programming communication guidelines with undergraduate students.

Zarb, Mark; Hughes, Janet; Richards, John

Abstract

Pair programming has several benefits when it is successfully used by students and experts alike. However, research shows that novice pairs find the necessary pair communication to be one of the main challenges in adopting this process. A set of industry-inspired pair programming guidelines have been derived and evaluated from qualitative examinations of expert pairs, with the aim of helping novice programmers communicate within their pair. This research describes a further evaluation of these guidelines with a number of student pairs, and demonstrates how novice pairs who were exposed to the guidelines became comfortable communicating with their partners.

• Start Date: Mar 4, 2015
• Publication Date: Feb 24, 2015
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Pages: 314-319
• Institution Citation: ZARB, M., HUGHES, J. and RICHARDS, J. 2015. Further evaluations of industry-inspired pair programming communication guidelines with undergraduate students. In Proceedings of the 46th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) technical symposium on computer science education (SIGCSE 2015): keep connected, keep committed, keep computing, 4-7 March 2015, Kansas City, USA. New York: ACM [online], pages 314-319. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/2676723.2677241
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2676723.2677241
• Keywords: Pair programming; Communication skills; Software engineering; Collaboration; Students; CS education research study